Mexico’s Changing Residential Landscapes: The End of Informality?

• In Event: Mexico’s Social Interest Housing Planning Disaster

Abstract

The massive expansion of formal housing for lower-income groups in Mexico over recent decades is often promoted as a sign of triumphant modernisation, but scholars have generally been highly critical. This paper asks how, from the residents’ perspective, the new mass housing developments compare with existing options for Mexico’s urban poor. It is often assumed that, as with their social interest housing predecessors, the targeting of this form of housing at salaried workers means that they cater for a separate population, distinctly different from those groups who build homes illegally in unserviced, informal, settlements. My research in the city of Guadalajara questions this assumption: although the residents may on the whole be better off than residents of informal settlements, there is nonetheless an overlap. Some residents of informal settlements have given up formal sector housing, and some residents of social interest housing (old and new) have previously occupied informal homes, or plan to do so in the future. Their ability to do so may however be constrained, because the new housing developments have changed the ‘rules of the game’ in significant ways. It remains to be seen whether the new formal housing will displace informal housing or further promote its expansion, and informalisation of the formal is another possibility.

Author

• Ann Varley, University College London